With the actual diamond anniversary today June 5, 2012, Susan has been watching many of the grand festivities on telly. Sunday's never-since-the-eighteenth-century Thames River pageant will be in her painter’s mind as she arrives soon to the boats and water outside her studio in Martha’s Vineyard.

And Susan is all up-to-date with her recent royal history having just finished Sally Bedell Smith’s engaging biography Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch. While Ms. Smith details the public life of this remarkable and unique head-of-state, national symbol, wife, mother and grandmother, we are also treated to such Gloriana II details as the Queen’s beauty regime and brand of face cream…